Kate Folk

Artist Statement

My work often involves power dynamics in relationships, body horror, and characters who make choices that run counter to their best interests. Some of my recently published short stories have been about: a sculptor who’s trapped in a revolving Space Needle-esque restaurant when a coup breaks out in the city below; a ward for a rare disease that causes patients’ bones to dissolve at night and reconstitute in the morning; an apocalyptic scenario in which the earth is being gradually eaten by a curtain of void; a society in which people fetishize each other’s internal organs; a woman who becomes a reluctant celebrity after all the other women on the planet are eliminated, and who thereby functions as an object upon which all the world’s men project their anger, fantasies, and Oedipal preoccupations.

While At Headlands

I’m continuing work on my as-yet-untitled novel, which centers on a technology that outsources unpleasant human interactions, as well as radicalized, artificially-intelligent robotic limbs who stage an implicitly feminist uprising. Though it might in some ways be considered a satire—of Bay Area tech culture, academia, the increasingly exploitative “gig” economy, hegemonic gender roles, and other things—at its core the novel grapples with more universal themes: the mutability of identity, the ways in which we hurt each other as a byproduct of indecision, and the terror of being truly seen by another person.